The Written Peace:
Open Forum of June 26, 2005
Name your subject. Write as much or as little as you want. To get your blood boiling, perhaps I should mention the matter of Karl and the outrageous remarks he made last week about liberals. The great outcry for him to apologize or resign has so far been met by neither an apology nor by a letter of resignation. This is not surprising: whereas the Democrats have a habit these days of speaking bluntly about the mendacity, incompetence, and criminal acts of Republicans, only to issue retractions and apologies within a matter of hours (Howard Dean notwithstanding), the Republicans have no such routine in their portfolio of rhetoric. Karl said what he had to say, but he did so much more: by getting such a huge, negative reaction, he used his enemies as his megaphone. Now, that's political skill.
There was a time when progressivism would not have allowed itself to be backed into such a corner of no-win reactivity. But that was long ago.
For other talking points, let us not forget this past week's U.S. Supreme Court decision that extends the doctrine of eminent domain to include government seizures of private property for commercial development. Such an outcry has been heard about that ruling; one would think people had just discovered that a large and powerful presence of the state in the affairs of citizens never comes to good end. This used to be the message of conservatives, but that was in the old days, when there was a vital branch of conservatism with the message that we should be forever suspicious of sovereign power. But that, too, was long ago.
The good news is that gasoline prices are rising rapidly, the stock market is in full retreat, and polls are showing regular folks having their concerns about our president. People are getting fussy even about Iraq and some other Bush Administration fiascos. It's probably a bit cynical to note that average folks seem to be getting uncomfortable about a war waged from and sustained by lies only because their pocketbooks are being pinched by the soaring cost of energy. Admittedly, some folks might remember a time or two when people lost their confidence in a president long before his policies had hurt them personally in their wallets. But that was a very long time ago.
Memories of better times are great that way: they inform us of how we should be in the here and now by reminding us of how much better we once were. Even if we never were all that much better, one can hope that maybe there really was a time when we as a people were not quite like we are now. It's pretty scary for a group standing in the deep forest of the new century to finally realize that its moral-ethical-political compass failed way back up the trail.
Stupid compass. Must have been made in China.
Speak your peace, this evening. The pantry has some snacks; the espresso/hot chocolate machine was just overhauled with an environment-friendly Turbo Water Steam Blaster™; and the cats said they might do a little Can-Can routine they've been working on all week.
The Dark Wraith will be in and out as he works on this week's analysis.
Published 6/26/2005 07:29:00 PM
<< 43 Comments Total
Well it seems I'm first tonight...
I would have to say without a doubt the compass died on Nov. 2 with the flawed election of Bush II: Apocolyse Now ;). Even compasses made in China aren't that bad.
The really compelling supremem court stuff will come this next week with the Ten Commandments ruling due to be issued and the possible resignation of both Rhenquist and O'Connor from the court. Depending on the 10 Comm ruling it will either have the Theocrats singing in the street or it will have them foaming at the mouth about how we are persecuting them for their religion.
I personally want to see them whipped up to a frothy boil and spontaneously combust as the SCOTUS upholds the ever elusive separation of church and state. Because it will be a victory for what's left of our democracy.
If the ruling goes the other way then it to me will be on of the final crashing blows in our Highway to Hell. Too bad Michael Landon isn't here to help us on this highway like he was on his long running TV show. If they rule the way the Theocrats want we will see the 10 Comm's in every building from here to the edge of creation.
So the coming week has the posibility to make the previous one look tame by comparsion. I for one am already hanging on to my hat and my passport. ;)
-Gary A
i wannna see the cats. a liitle espresso would be nice. and how about, as jackson browne sez "a taste of something fine." we'll trade bong hits.
the best response i have seen to rove is "tell me to my face, chickenkawk!"
stocks are going downhill, just in time for dear leader's big private accounts push. gas prices way up. suck my tailpipe, suv drivers.
grand decision by the supremes, right in line with the feds taking away any financial help to states. so give private property to a better tax base.
and as always---my thanks to the dark wraith for the economics curriculum in my continuing education. depressing as it may be, i far prefer it to the spokesliars of this admin.
Hiya Dark Wraith - Yay! an open forum.
Karl Rove doesn't have to apologize. There's no one arm-twisting him to do so. With the Dems, they try to make a statement, or two... and they do, good ones. They, then, have to retract what they said for fear. Plain and simple fear - of course, I'm just guessing about that, but it's a logical reason that fits, what, with all those Republicans pushing them around.
Cheney in the hospital for a knee injury. We haven't heard anything about that. Maybe, the voodoo doll is working. Though, it isn't a knee, that the needle's stuck into. It's stuck where his heart would normally be. The Dubya voodoo doll seems to be working alright. It's in the toilet. Those numbers are slowly sliding down. I guess it just takes time.
Good evening, Old White Lady.
Mr. Cheney was taken into the orthopedics ward, but he was then moved quickly and quietly over to the cardiac care unit.
Mr. Cheney's heart, ossified as it is, was bothering him.
Now, here's the sixty-four dollar question: if Cheney is taken away to his just and rather hot reward, who will replace him as Vice President?
The Dark Wraith can only wonder.
Eventually, Dread Pirate Roberts, I shall be touring the country, and my route will be determined by where the people live who have been in the community of The Dark Wraith Forums.
Keep your eyes open. Sooner or later, you'll see an old red Jeep coming up your driveway.
The Dark Wraith will bring coffee.
Good evening, Gary A.
Yes, this coming week promises lots of thrills and spills. The notion that the Supreme Court is the supreme law of the nation might turn out to be somewhat irrelevant in the event that the Supreme Court elects to create a new nation this week.
The Dark Wraith will miss the old one, fading away as it has been for the past four-and-a-half years.
For you conspiracy fans out there, this is a fun story to read, compliments of a commenter over at BlondeSense.
I had known about this story for quite some time, but I didn't know there was any Website that was giving a really comprehensive report without breathless, wild howling in the mix. Although the writer of the article is definitely a conspiracy theorist, he does seem to maintain at least a semblance of decorum as he goes through the events of interest on September 11, 2001. He does, unfortunately, throw in some of the usual "this story could blow the lid off the whole lie" rhetoric, but I suppose he deserves some latitude, considering what he thinks he's learned.
The Dark Wraith leaves it to the readers to decide how worked up to get about stories like this.
And as a point of objective response, allow me to give a bit of the official explanation (be sure to read the article so the points below have context):
The people in the sub-basement felt two "explosions," the first coming one from below them, the second one moments later coming from above them.
The first explosion they claim was a sub-basement detonation was actually the jet hitting the building. The second explosion they felt was the jet's fuel detonating.
The fellow standing by the cargo elevator shaft was severely burned by the first explosion because he came to the others already in that state before anyone felt the second explosion.
The injured man was standing by a cargo elevator. The flames from the jet hitting the building traveled down the elevator shaft as if it were a flue shoot, and those flames pumped out right into the man as he stood in the doorway of the elevator many floors below. He wasn't burned by any explosion below him; he was roasted by the flames from above him.
The walls in the sub-basement cracked severely from the first explosion.
Precisely. The jet hitting the building compromised the foundations of the building, meaning that it was inevitable that the building would eventually drop straight down once the center girder structure became pliable from the intense heat of the fire.
Now, wait a minute. Didn't you say that the fire was caused by the fuel detonating after the primary explosion? How could the man have been burned so severely by flames roaring down more than forty floors before the fuel explosion that the people in the basement thought was the jet hitting the building?
The fuel created the massive fire, but the building was set ablaze immediately upon impact. The main body of fuel didn't explode immediately, but that doesn't mean fuel in other parts of the aircraft didn't blow up upon impact.
But the bottom line is that this means the building was almost certainly doomed when the plane hit the building because the sub-structure was compromised. And this same physical process and sequence of events occurred in three buildings?
Yes. That's physics: same causes, same effects.
Uh, one of those buildings that went down wasn't hit. So it wasn't the 'same causes', now was it?
No, but most of the same processes predicated the collapse of all three buildings.
The Dark Wraith has issued the rejoinder.
I have over 30 articles on 9/11 which I found the most interesting and somewhere in the file is a treatment of the article you highlighted.
GoogleSearching "9/11" "conspiracy" yields 1,560,000 hits.
PoLT suspects all this will end up in the same file as the "Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy". It's only taken us 65 years to discover that FDR knew the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor. So, if you're no more than 20 yrs. old or so, maybe you'll someday find out the truth. 'Course that presupposes the world doesn't end on Dec. 23, 2012.
OH, stop it with that Mayan calendar, Peter.
Everyone knows the world ends the day the coffee runs out.
The Dark Wraith fears the Apocalypse.
I see ya got me started on 9/11 again.
This article's up your alley, Wraith: "The Most Important Questions of 9/11: 'The Put-Options'" at
http://tinyurl.com/8b9ss
*Meow*, Dark Wraith, *purrr* *purrr* *purrr*:
Saddie: While mom's sleeping, we found the computer keys. She hid them, again! What she doesn't realize is that when it looks like we're sleeping, one of us, is always watching. We stopped by to see if we could get some Can-Can lessons. We thought it would be fun to surprise mom. *purr*
Mango: *grrrr* - the other two insisted it would fun. Me? I'd like to shove a couple pills down her throat! *grrrr*
Cotton Those two, what do they know? I'm the only one that knows how to act like a cat, around here. I have aloofness down! But, as Saddie said, it would be fun to surprise mom. *aloof*
Lordie. Talking cats and conspiracy theories.
To think this thread started out with normal stuff like the take-over of the country by religious zealots and energy prices going high enough to cause civil insurections.
The Dark Wraith is always amazed by how this blog can quickly this blog can turn a weird corner.
And speaking of weird, Peter of Lone Tree, I don't suppose you'd be interested in doing a follow-up, investigative piece on the Battle of Los Angeles, would you?
The Dark Wraith wonders if there are any people still alive who were there that night.
I must have missed the cats doing their Can-Can routine. :sigh:
As to all the theories about 9/11, I can only say that since I have no technical expertise in any of the areas involved, I am basically clueless. I would like to know the truth but doubt that it will come out in my lifetime.
However, I can say that my brother was in DC heading towards the airport when the Pentagon was hit. He saw the jet as it passed over his car and saw the smoke and fireball from the impact. My brother worked for American Airlines before he retired so I can discount the speculation about a missile or small plane striking the Pentagon.
THANK YOU AUNTIE ROO! That particular idea has always struck me as singlularly inadequate to the info. available in the newspapers. It isn't as if the Pentagon wasn't specifically designed to withstand explosions or anything after all..... (Having toured the Pentagon as a kid when my uncle worked there on one of his Navy tours of duty, I seem to recall that it was specifcally designed with that in mind.) After all it was created during the height of the cold war. Don't you suppose they would have reinforced the concrete walls so that something like a nuclear explosion wouldn't have quite the impact on the Pentagon that it would have on a building built according to conventional specs?
- oddjob
As to Gary A's SCOTUS observations, "this Globe report was in the Sunday Boston Globe yesterday."
- oddjob
BTW, DW, I can't respond to this survey because I don't have a primary source for news. It depends on what news is sought and what I'm doing at the time, sometimes it's the newspaper, sometimes it's radio, and often it's online. However, NO ONE of those sources is a "primary" one.
- oddjob
Dear Dark Wraith,
I missed the can-can AND the hot chocolate; are there anymore mushrooms - oops, I mean marshmallows?
Now, here's the sixty-four dollar question: if Cheney is taken away to his just and rather hot reward, who will replace him as Vice President?
I am convinced that Cheney is the shrub's insurance policy against assassins, so the question becomes - if Cheney goes, how long will it be before the shrubbery gets trimmed??
I was living in L.A. during "The Battle of Los Angeles" on Feb. 25, 1942, and I literally shit my pants that day; well, soiled my diaper is probably a more correct term of reference since I was 2 months old to the day. (PoLT includes that reference so readers can determine that his birthday and Christmas gift can be combined.)
From one ( http://tinyurl.com/7elnj ) of the 976 sites found when googlesearching "Battle of Los Angeles" "UFO" (http://tinyurl.com/87l97):
"On Wednesday, February 25, 1942, a huge unidentified craft hovered over the city of Los Angeles. This event, dubbed the “Battle of Los Angeles,” was witnessed by hundreds of thousands of residents of the area. Spotlights, intent on spotting Japanese aircraft, played over the motionless craft. The military lobbed almost 2,000 rounds of high explosive shells at the floating sphere. Unscathed, the hovering UFO leisurely moved off to the south and disappeared over the ocean south of Long Beach. Six civilians were killed, others injured -- the results of shells fragments".
Jeff Rense at http://tinyurl.com/bpheh has some interesting photos.
So anyway, readers can well understand that when the Roswell incident occurred in 1947, PoLT was heard to remark, "Oh, so what else is new"?
Well, I'll tell ya, Peter.
I am an old, dyed-in-wool conspiracy theorist to the bottom of my soul; but I'm also trained as a scientist. As such, I am torn between wanton credulity and pounding skepticism.
Most of what the conspiracy theory network has to say about September 11, 2001, is pretty easy to dispense with; but that doesn't mean we have the whole story. No government is going to tell the entire truth, even under the best of circumstances; and a situation like this is not going to be, in any way, shape, or form, conducive to the angels of a government's better nature regarding transparency.
What really happened is probably a lot grimmer and a whole lot more confusing than what we are told. Anyone who believes that any U.S. Administration would tell the whole truth about an act of such aggression is just plain naïve. That having been said, the conspiracy theorists just go hog wild down too many ridiculous, blind, and just plain wrong alleys.
However, the put options activity bothers me to the bottom of my heart, and that's because I am one of the few financial economists who believe in the so-called "strong form" of the efficient markets hypotheis. In other words, I am convinced that markets, at least on the global scale, impound with blinding speed all public and a whole lot of private information in securities prices.
The amount of money that was made in put options because of the supposedly "unexpected" attack of September 11, 2001, staggers the imagination. By my own estimates, more that a hundred billion dollars came out of that one event; and that money went somewhere.
A hundred billion dollars is a lot of money. It's enough to finance something that scares me half to death. And that money is out there; somewhere, that money exists. That's not conspiracy theory; that's finance.
We'll never know one way or the other if there was some conspiracy behind the destruction of three buildings and the murders of more than three thousand people on that cursed day almost four years ago.
I fear, however, that we will know, someday, where that blood money went.
The Dark Wraith needs to stop staying up so late.
And another thing, Peter.
I had long ago filed the Battle of Los Angeles in my brain's "Just Let It Go; You Need a Life" section in the basement; but thanks to you, it's back on my desk.
One thousand four hundred forty-three, 12-inch artillery shells. Most of them making "direct hits."
To this day, Peter, there is nothing in any military inventory on the planet Earth that could take more than a dozen hits from a 12.8-inch shell. Nothing.
The Dark Wraith really needs to get more sleep at night.
That Battle of Los Angeles stuff is totally cool; I've never heard of it before. Maybe those intelligent design experts do have part of it right.
As far as 9/11 goes, even if you throw out the obivious lunitics there are some pretty strange anomalies that don't support the official version. The problem anymore seems to be ability to separate fact from fiction in some of the basic details.
To this day, Peter, there is nothing in any military inventory on the planet Earth that could take more than a dozen hits from a 12.8-inch shell. Nothing.
Except of course, Osama bin Laden's cave.
Touché, Mr. Goat. Touché.
The Dark Wraith forgot about Osama bin Forgotten About.
And by the way, Mr. Goat, it never ceases to amaze me how few people, other than total conspiracy theory folks, know anything at all about the Battle of Los Angeles.
The Dark Wraith needs to start a second blog just to get people up to speed on these kinds of things.
Good evening, Dark Wraith:
If Cheney had to step down as Vice President, could Karl Rove be appointed? I'm not too fluent on how the government would select a VP and google wasn't cooperating. Is there a position that would automatically step into the VP position, as the VP would automatically take the place of the president should he be out of the picture?
I was thinking that if the president could appoint a VP, his selection would most likely be Rove. This would give Rove the stepping stone to run for president in the next election. It would also mean people need to MAKE SURE the ballots change back to an accountable way to tally the votes.
Good evening, Old White Lady.
There is no statutory or Constitutional succession to the Vice Presidency.
Although some might disagree with me, it is my considered judgment that Mr. Rove would not want to be Vice President of the United States. He is a hit man; and despite his recent foray into the limelight, he prefers to work in the shadows. That makes his enemies look like conspiracy kooks every time they invoke his name whenever some political dirty trick is pulled.
My bet would be that Mr. Bush would appoint Condoleeza Rice. But this could all be moot speculation: the Devil might not be all that excited about having Mr. Cheney move back home.
The Dark Wraith assumes that Satan, like any other parent, likes a quiet house.
Good morning, Dark Wraith.
I quote you:
There's actually another way to cause links to open in a new window. It requires adding two lines of code in your template, which can be tricky because each of them must be placed at exactly the right place; but once you've put them in, you don't have to write the target attribute in your actual links anymore.
Yes, I would appreciate that code. The comment thread is at this post.
Thank you!
Good evening, Old White Lady.
I put the comment there with the step-by-step instructions. I can't promise you that it'll work on the first try because I can't see your actual template with the XML tags, so I'm doing a bit of educated guessing about how the XML tag that calls the posts is configured.
But I think I'm right.
The Dark Wraith acknowledges, however, that he is far too incompetent to be so optimistic.
♠Dark Wraith♠ - You were right!! Thank you! This is GREAT!
Yes, I was watching you doing the recoding of the template, and I left a message on that comment thread as soon as I saw you republish your template.
The Dark Wraith has provided.
i just came to see the can can floor show, but i believe gerald ford would be an appropriate VP.
......waiting for the red jeep to show up in the great northern canuckistan
Good morning, Dark Wraith.
Thanks again, for helping me with the coding on my blog. Your instructions were terrific. They were so clear, that it took very little time!
Oh, yeah - like lenin's ghost, I'm waiting to see the red jeep drive up, too:)
As to VP matters, I agree with DW as far as Rove goes. I don't think he'd be caught dead actually putting his name out into the limelight that way. That's just not how a political "mandarin" (not to be taken as any kind of ethnic slur, either) works.
If I recall correctly, when Agnew had to resign because of investigations into state tax irregularities going back to when he was a Maryland political big fish Nixon simply chose House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to be the next VP, and so he was.
I can't recall if there were Senate confirmation hearings for that or not, but I don't think there were. As DW said, I don't think there is a protocol for that laid out anywhere in federal law.
I was less than impressed by Ford, but looking back now, I kind of wish he was still pres. At least he was a basically decent human being!
- oddjob
Essay:
In a time of dissent what is patriotism?
- oddjob
The light pollution of suburban sprawl kills the funding for the largest observatory east of Texas, and the first to detect a planet beyond our solar system.
- oddjob
OddJob, you know very well you hit me right in the gut with stories about astronomy, considering that was my first declared major as an undergraduate many years ago.
(Yeah, yeah. I'll have you know that they were well aware that the Earth wasn't at the center of the universe by the time I was in school.)
The light pollution problem has gotten so far out of hand that there are virtually no observatories on the surface of the planet that are not being affected to a greater or lesser extent.
Worse still, as the 21st Century gets moving along a bit further, the night sky will start to be illuminated from above by certain types of activity in Earth orbit. It's not going to be like the night sky is as bright as daylight, but it's not going to be dark anymore like you and I might remember it from our childhoods.
Ultimately, most meaningful telescope work will have to be done in orbit as ground-based observatories become less and less capable of dealing with the light pollution.
The only good thing about it is that, perhaps someday, we'll be able to pick up an observatory at a decent price on eBay.
The Dark Wraith gets his PayPal account ready.
There is one place in northwestern PA that is famous for its dark night sky, but I forget the name at the moment. It's one of the few places in the northeast that's virtually unimpacted by light pollution. I've never been there.
From about 5th grade through 9th grade I wanted to be an astronomer, but once I saw what the most elementary mathematics was like, I knew I wasn't cut out for it. As I grew older I ultimately realized that what had caught my fascination in the first place wasn't really so much the science (much as I found some of it fascinating) as the mythology associated with the Ancient Greek understanding of the night sky.
Fortunately, that's (only) a little more resistant to light pollution....
- oddjob
ps: A truly ironic waste of energy, no? I've read up to 30% of most streetlamps' light goes up into the sky and out into space, a complete waste to us, and yet the light manufacturers keep on trucking on......
Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter's land.
The Lost Liberty Hotel
[Laughter]
Well that's a nice, sour piece of snark, ins't it Mr. Goat!
(And I hope they elect to do it!)
- oddjob
Good afternoon, Mr. Goat.
If some private developer actually gets a municipal authority to confiscate Justice Souter's land against his will, it will once and for all time confirm for me that there really, truly is a god.
And not only is it a god of merely righteous vengeance; it is a god with a delicious sense of ironic humor.
The Dark Wraith really must start tithing again at the church.
I'll have you know, Mr. Goat, that I almost hurt myself in my haste to get Mr. Souter's story into print over at Blondesense.
Good evening, to all. I am posting some comments to test one last minor feature for the evening. These posts are only a test.
The Dark Wraith will explain what he's up to if and only if this inspiration actually works.